BeerAdvocate Search now uses Google CSE

What was wrong with the hybrid version? Didn't we try this like a year ago and thus the move to the hybrid version?

The BA search had its issues, but it was super efficient for some things, and had a much more usable interface. Google is certainly better for misspellings and vague searches, but I really liked the BA search for precise things. Once you get past the learning curve on the BA search, it works very well.

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This encapsulates my experiences as well. All of the search failures I've run into involved issues with diacriticals, special characters, apostrophes, and common words, but the hybrid Google failsafe made sure that whatever failures occurred at least had something show up.

This new search is incredibly unappealing aesthetically (in that it doesn't seem to mesh with the rest of the site and appears as a brick wall of text/thumbnails), and the back-end filtering makes searches take longer (and I will acknowledge here both that this is my experience only and the extra time isn't all that significant, just a nuisance).

Funny enough, I searched for McGee's in Chicago: Since it wasn't the top result, I went to the Places filter; out of the four results, none of them were what I was looking for. For the sake of it, I went back to All, and there it was, the place I was looking for a few results in. Does this make sense to anyone? 'Cause it's just weird to me, especially when it came up just fine in the old search when filtering for Places...

This encapsulates my experiences as well. All of the search failures I've run into involved issues with diacriticals, special characters, apostrophes, and common words, but the hybrid Google failsafe made sure that whatever failures occurred at least had something show up.

This new search is incredibly unappealing aesthetically (in that it doesn't seem to mesh with the rest of the site and appears as a brick wall of text/thumbnails), and the back-end filtering makes searches take longer (and I will acknowledge here both that this is my experience only and the extra time isn't all that significant, just a nuisance).

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I could offer my constructive criticism, but it would basically be a carbon copy of this post. I really just don't see how this change is taking things in a positive direction.

Once you were in a thread and went to the search bar there was a box you could check that said "search this thread only". This is also a feature I miss, especially when trying to figure out hints in a BIF.

I also miss that the search was tailored to the part of the site you're in (e.g., when in the Beer tab your search only looks at beers; the Forum tab only looks at threads). Now if you want to search the forums, you have to go to the advanced search option and it's just as many steps/clicks as it was using the old way.

There will probably never be a search function that everyone likes, but I appreciate that the admins are trying...

Can we please change back now? If I want to type in a word to see the threads that have that word in the title, the results that come up first are typically old, from January or February, and I can't search 1 forum by itself.